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AN ADDRESS 



PRONOUNCED BEFORE 



THE HOUSE OE CONVOCATIOK 



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BY THE REV. JOHiN WILLIAMS, M. A. 



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HIS POSITION, HIS DANGERS, AND HIS DUTIES. 



AN ADDRESS 



PRONOUNCED BEFORE 



THE HOUSE OE COIYOCATION 



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^ HARTFORD, 

AUGUST Vth, MDCCCXLVI. 




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BY THE REV. J. wi^LIAMS, M. A. 



RECTOR OF ST. GEORGE S CHURCH, SCHENECTADY, AND A JUNIOR FELLOW 
OF TRINITY COLLEGE. 



PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF CONVOCATION. 



HARTFORD: ^ I^ ^ ' 

WILLIAM FAXON, ' 

CALENDAR PRESS. 

1846. 






*^* It may be proper to state, that this was the first Address de- 
livered before the Convocation of Trinity College. The Gradu- 
ates v^ere incorporated under that appellation by Statute of the 
Corporation, passed August the 6th, 1845. 



■S- 






TO 

HIS SURVIVING CLASSMATES, 

AND 

TO THE MEMORY OF ONE DEPARTED, 

THE AUTHOR 

DEDICATES THIS ADDRESS. 



August, 1846. 



ADDEESS. 



Mr. Dean, and Gentlemen of ConvocatiOxn: 

It seems proper that the first words of him who on 
this occasion is honoured in addressing you, should be 
those of congratulation. There has been, as we trust, 
revived among us, something of the old and true prin- 
ciple of the University. Not indeed in its ancient form, 
nor in precisely the ancient mode of its expression. 
For it may and often does chance, that a principle shall 
express itself in diverse outward forms in different ages, 
while yet in itself it remains unchanged. Indeed no ex- 
ternal organisations or forms within which principles are 
enshrined, — save only those which being of divine 
appointment are adapted to every age, and not to be 
changed by man, — can be expected to remain precisely 
the same, generation after generation, and age after age. 
For they exist in a world whose social and intellectual 
relations are continually changing : and by those very 
changes, demanding corresponding changes in those ex- 
ternal modes by which unchanging principles are brought 
to bear and do their work, whether on individuals or on 
masses of our race. 

To have attempted then, in our age and country, — 
even had we possessed the means of doing it, — to revive 



those venerable academic forms and organisations- 
which in the ages when they spontaneously sprung up, 
were adequate expressions of real feelings, and adequate 
supplies of real wants, would have been utterly unmean- 
ing. To have attempted, — supposing again the means 
of doing so within reach, — to have attempted to copy, 
with whatever degree of accuracy, the present polity of 
foreign Universities, those slow accretions of many ages, 
where one anomaly corrects another, and the genius loci 
transfuses and blends together an otherwise inharmonious 
whole, would have been even more absurd. For to 
what would it all have amounted ? In the former case 
you would have had the merest piece of antiquarian 
trifling, with no more of reality about it, than children's 
play. In the latter, you would have had a body without 
a soul, a cumbrous machine without a motive power ; 
for that there would have been wanting time honored 
associations, old rights and privileges, successions of 
ancient custom and wonted honors ; and more than all, 
succession of actual life from age to age, filling and per- 
vading, giving meaning and reality, power and operation, 
visible working and glorious result. 

Yet while this is so, there are still high principles 
involved in the true being of a University or a College, 
which may express themselves very differently, in differ- 
ent ages and countries, while they themselves, as has 
been said, remain unchanged. One of these principles, — 
and that one of the noblest,- — we have recognised, and 
given to it expression and outward form in the organisa- 
tion of our present House of Convocation. Another 
has been also recognised, and has found expression in 



7 

the giving to our College as her name henceforward 
through all time, the thrice sacred name of the most 
blessed Trinity. The last of these twq principles may 
be stated in a few words. It is that learning is the 
handmaid of the Faith. A principle which in such a 
place and such an assemblage as this, can need no vindi- 
cation nor elucidation. The first principle however to 
which allusion has just now been made, may seem to 
demand a few more words. 

There are in the world, three Associations ordained 
of God himself, all harmonious, though distinct ex- 
pressions of His one law and rule, the Family, the 
State, the Church. To each are allotted their distinct 
offices, and on men as members of each are devolved 
distinct responsibilities. Nay, we may say, — not there- 
by intending to assert succession of existence, or to deny 
that the Church in some form or another is older than 
the Family, being even from the beginning, — that the 
world was trained first by means of union in Families, 
and next by means of union in States, to enter in the 
fulness of time into the vast and awful union of the 
Church of the last Dispensation. A union which com- 
prises within itself, though it does not absorb into itself, 
those other unions which preceded it. A union toward 
which indefinite longings, and vague though real wants 
had been impelling men for many ages before it came : 
and which they had endeavoured to find and realise in 
those four great empires of the ancient world, before the 
visioned image of whose mysterious majesty, the heart 
of the Babylonian monarch had shrunk away in terror. 
Nuvv to thc^e associations ordained of God, men have 



8 

from time to time, added others of their own. In doing 
so, they have followed the line of the divine working : 
and they have erred and failed, not when they have held 
such associations as subordinate to the Family, the State, 
the Church, and intended only to aid in certain points 
and for certain purposes the work of each : not then, I 
say, have they erred and failed. But when, as we be- 
hold in our time under various names and in various 
shapes,^ they have attempted to substitute theirs in place 
of those of God. When they have undertaken not to 
assist, but to supplant : not reverently to aid, but ruth- 
lessly to subvert, and on the ground thus cleared to erect 
a fabric of their own, whose top shall reach the heavens. 
Then, even as those four old empires which were human 
substitutes to provide for longings w^hich only the Al- 
mighty could provide for, crumbled and decayed, till 
gold and silver, brass and iron, and clay lay mingled in 
undistinguishable ruin, even thus will after substitutes, 
bear they whose name they may, vanish before the stone 
cut without hands and destined to fill the earth. 

First among these human associations, subordinate and 
in a certain sense auxiliary to the divine ones, and the 
child indeed of the last and most glorious, stands the 
University. First among sonships and brotherhoods, 
other than those of the Family and the State, and the 
more awful ones of the Church to which these others 
point and by which they are sanctified, are the sonship 
which binds the scholar to his College as to a loving 
mother; the brotherhood which unites him to all those 
whom the same mother has trained for the solemn work 

^Reference is made to the schemes of Owen, Fourier, and others. - 



9 

of life ; making herself herein the worthy handmaid of 
Family, and State and Church. And this I have ven- 
tured to call one of the noblest principles involved in the 
true being of a University or a College. May I not 
even call it the essential one ? That which lies at the 
very foundation, and alone gives life and meaning to 
either the one or the other. Nor is this twofold tie, a 
transient and temporary thing. It is, it must be, perma- 
nent. The training of a College is for life. And as 
day by day the scholar finds that training brought into 
use and action, carried on and developed in a thousand 
unexpected ways, and influencing all his relations in all 
their various forms, how shall it be, that he will not 
recur with a son's reverence and love to her who gave it 
to him ? And bound up inseparably with this feeling, 
forming indeed a part of it, comes also the feeling of 
continuous union with that honoured mother, of a con- 
tinued sharing in her joys and sorrows, her weal and 
woe, and a continued brotherhood inviting to earnestness 
and effort, with all her other sons. And this permanent, 
this abiding tie, is recognised and expressed in the;^; 
organisation of our present House of Convocation. It 
is the very offspring, unless I am much in error, of these 
feelings and convictions. 

In this organisation then, I seem to find the recogni- 
tion of the permanent and holy tie, which through life 
and wherever his lot may be, binds the scholar to his 
College. In that sacred name which now adorns our 
College, I seem to hear proclaimed in an unfaithful age, 
that learning is the handmaid of the Faith. In these 
two things then, let me find the subject to which your 
2 



10 

thoughts will now be called : The Scholar ; the Chris- 
tian Scholar : his Position, his Dangers and his Duties. 

To attain to a true conception of the position of the 
Christian Scholar, whether in our own age or in any 
other, I must ask you to go with me in a cursory view 
of that wonderful progress, by which the wisdom of the 
world was brought into subjection to, and the mind of 
the world was moulded on, the philosophy of the Cross. 

Could we suppose the vision of an Apostle or a Dis- 
ciple to have been strengthened and extended, as during 
those ten days of "awful pause in earth and heaven," 
he stood with the hundred and twenty in the Holy City ; 
could we suppose the vision of such an one to have been 
strengthened and extended till it could embrace the 
civilised world, what a spectacle, viewing that world 
under one aspect only, would it have beheld ! Around 
it in Jerusalem was to be seen the sacred learning with 
whatever additions and distortions, of a wondrous peo- 
ple, and a far reaching age. Throned in the temple's 
courts, and deriving a more solemn and imposing dignity 
from such a dwelling place, the very house of God, 
Judea's learning gathered her band of venerable doctors, 
and grounded herself upon the living oracles of God's 
own word. Southward and to the east, from the sol- 
emn remains of Egyptian greatness, to the caverned 
temples of India, and thence to the Sarmatian Gates, 
there spreads itself under various forms and in various 
developments what may be termed the Oriental Philos- 
ophy.^ While westward, there rise up the Academy and 

iJt is not intended to intimate that there was any actual definite system, 
such asMosheim so ingeniously fancies; but the general spirit of contem- 
plation rather than reasoning, is certainly common to the Eastern Sages.* 



11 

the Lyceum, the Porch and the Garden, those four 
mouths, through which the fourfold Greek philosophy, 
spoke to the human race in words that are not yet for- 
gotten.^ Every where are collected crowds of sages 
grown grey in solitary thought or learned converse, 
every where are there stores of written wisdom, the slow 
accumulations of successive years, and all of pomp and 
pride and mystery, with which learning can be sur- 
rounded. It is indeed a glorious sight, this mass of mind 
thus living and at w^ork. For let us not take too cir- 
cumscribed a view of it. It expressed and as it were 
wrote itself out, not merely in the poem or the history, 
the stirring oration or the profound speculation in phi- 
losophy : but it had issued also for untold years, in the 
massive and magnificent porticoes of Egypt, in the stu- 
pendous excavations of the Indian mountains, in the 
solid and enduring arches and aqueducts of Rome, and 
in those highest developments of merely human thoughts, 
the graceful orders of the threefold architecture of inven- 
tive Greece. It showed itself also to men's eyes in all 
the sensuous beauties framed on earthly types, of Grecian 
art ; and spoke in their ears in the stern tones of Roman 
law, which like the art of Greece was waiting for a 
heavenly spark, to raise it to the fulness of its life. 

Such was the world's mind in all its majesty and 
glory, shrined and throned in earth's most lofty places ; 
and thus stood the philosophy of the Cross in its relations 
to it ; confided to the trust of twelve men, whose library 
and school and porch and garden, was a little upper 

^See Gibbon's masterly sketch ; Decline and Fall, Vol. III. p. 62, Amer. 
Edit. 



12 

chamber somewhere in Jerusalem. Yet after all, we 
shall not attain a correct view of these relations, without 
remembering how in God's providence things bad been 
working so as to advance the progress of the Church to 
the dominion of human intellect. About three hundred 
years before the Christian era, Palestine and the regions 
round about by becoming Greek, became also European ; 
and then in order of time there followed a series of 
events, which mysterious as they must have been to those 
who lived during their occurrence, are to us full of 
meaning, and point directly to the triumphs of the Cross. 
Under Ptolemy |Philadelphus the Hebrew Scriptures 
were translated into Greek : and treasures of learnino; 
were gathered in Alexandria which drew together learn- 
ed men from every quarter of the world, forming for a 
century the great centre of study and scholarship. At 
the end of this period, just when in consequence of the 
long wars of the successors of Alexander, learning had 
declined throughout the greater portion of the Macedo- 
nian Empire, the cruelties of one of Ptolemy's succes- 
sors,^ drove the Alexandrian scholars from his city and 
scattered them among the nations. Under Antiochus, 
the then true religion, was almost merged in Greek 
Polytheism, but with the aid of the Asmone^n princes it 
rose into new strength and developed itself afresh : " so 
that while the Greek mind was spread throughout the 
East, the Jewish mind was spread throughout it too ; 
and from their interpenetration arose a diffused prepara- 
tion for the Faith." While very soon, the rising empire 

iPtolemy Physcon. See Pddeaux's Connexions, Vol. II. p. 276, 
Tegg's Edit. 



13 

of Rome, — sublime shadow of a heavenly reality, — 
received within itself the East, and pushed itself even to 
the shores of the x4tlantic ; tlius connecting by its mighty 
bonds the ancient plains of Babylon with " Britain 
divided from the world. "^ Through such immediate 
preparation had the world passed, and so as I have 
briefly described it, stood its learning, philosophy, and 
art, in relation to the Church and the philosophy of the 
Cross, at the moment when we have fancied an Apostle 
looking out on all these things. 

And now for a brief period there wasapause and silence. 
Such a silence on either side as there must have been, — 
for the comparison can hardly fail to suggest itself, — 
when the Lord Himself in all the apparent weakness of 
His early youth, stood in the presence of the hoary doc- 
tors in the temple : they wondering at His temerity. He 
resting in His Divinity. So stood the infant Church 
amid the systems and the learning of the world. But 
the pause was a brief one ; deep and solemn while it 
lasted, but brief. For time was precious, and the battle 
fierce : and so in all apparent weakness, and arrayed in 
weeds unmeet as men would say for the attire of divine 
philosophy, she went forth to claim to herself the wis- 
dom, to grasp and mould for herself the minds of men. 
The struggle was an arduous one, but the triumph was 
complete. We may not say that it was the noblest of 
the triumphs of the Faith ; for these are tears of penitence, 
and lives of holiness. Still it was a noble triumph, and 
it is written on an immortal page, even the souls of men. 

To trace it step by step, would be impossible here and 

^See the Christian Remembrancer for April, 1845, p. 331. 



14 

now, nor is it needful. It was a triumphant progress in 
which the Church went forth, when she conquered and 
brought under her own sway the fields of learning, phi- 
losophy and art. Yet unlike the progress of conquering 
men, it was not devastation but new life that marked her 
way. She came to the Academy and the Lyceum, the 
Porch and Garden, and gave a living kernel to the husks 
and shells she found there, and woke to life many a form 
of truth which had been standing moveless and isolated, 
like a marble statue ; while in place of these four homes 
of learning, there sprung up Schools and Universities 
almost without number. Amid the ruins of Memphis 
and of Heliopolis, she made the spirit of contemplation 
long-wasted and preying in itself, to issue in the lofty 
tones, ever lofty if not always truly regulated, of the 
Fathers of the Desert. She gave the Historian the clue, 
by which he could trace out the tangled web of the 
world's story, and read understandingly that wondrous 
course of ages, never before comprehended. She 
brought a nobler strain to the poet's lyre, and touched his 
eyes to see and his tongue to speak, deeper things in 
nature and in man, than men had dreamed before. She 
came to the Grecian Temple, and the Roman Basilic, 
and there arose in their places edifices more vast and 
of a rarer beauty, towering towards the heavens, and 
preaching not men's thoughts of truth and beauty, but 
those eternal archetypes of both, on which Creation has 
been framed. She took the painter's and the sculptor's 
hand, and instead of sensuous earthly forms on which the 
eye could scarcely look without defilement to the soul, 
there burst upon men's sight severe unearthly beauties, 



15 

holy and super-human grace, sources of the purest 
emotions and most sacred thoughts. She touched the 
unformed indigested mass of Roman Law/ and there 
issued from it, the Code, the Pandects and the Institutes, 
immortal works which tell at this very hour on all the 
civilised nations of the earth. But not to enter into 
more detail, where full detail is impossible, let it suffice 
to say, that this triumph of the Church and her divine 
philosophy, absorbing " all the keenness, the originality, 
the energy and the eloquence" of man, is witnessed to, 
and recorded in the Architecture, the Sculpture, the 
Painting, and above all in the Libraries of Christendom. 
As one has well and eloquently said : " to see the tri- 
umph of the Faith over the world's wisdom, we must 
enter those solemn cemeteries, in which are stored the 
relics and the monuments of Faith, — the great libraries 
of the world. Look along their shelves, and almost 
every name you read there, is in one sense or another, a 
trophy set up in record of the victories of Faith. How 
many long lives, what high aims, what single minded 
devotion, what intense contemplation, what fervent 
prayer, what untiring diligence, what toilsome conflicts 
has it taken to establish this supremacy." And all this 
glorious mass of living thought, speaking in written 
words or forms of art, widening in endless circles, sweep- 
ing outward for eighteen hundred years, and sweeping 
outward still, has for its centre and its source, the Holy 
Word of God. 

Now this view, brief and meagre as it is, may serve 
to show us what is the true position of even the humblest 

^See Gibbon's own admission. 



16 

Christian Scholar. In very deed he is a " citizen of no 
mean city." He is one in a brotherhood, second only 
to that which is the fulfilment of all, and toward which 
all others tend. 

Grant that his place may be obscure, his sphere of 
action limited. Yet he has a place, he has a sphere, and 
in them he has a work to do, a holy mission to fulfill. 
No man can live on earth — unless, that is, he utterly 
withdraws himself from other men, and makes himself 
wdiat God never meant he should be, an isolated being, 
— without in some way, generally in far more ways 
than he can know or fancy, coming in contact with the 
minds of other men. And that not casually now and 
then, but habitually and continually. However few in 
number then these minds may be, and however humble 
in position, yet minds they are, and they form an immor- 
tal page on which the Christian Scholar may inscribe 
truths that shall live and work throughout eternity. For 
in this respect the world of learning, is as the world of 
nature. And as in the latter we see not only mighty 
floods rolling on for immense distances and through 
widely spreading valleys, but find on more attentive ob- 
servation, that many unknown streams and fountains, 
each in its own secluded nook, doing its office and ad- 
ding its portion, have gone to swell those floods ; even so 
is it in the former, when there we look more intently 
and with a deeper observation* For look at the body of 
the learning of Christendom, not as a sluggish, inert, 
lifeless mass, but as living, moving, acting: bearing in 
some sense the relation to the human mind, which the 
water does to the solid parts of our globe, embracing 



17 

and permeating it ; and then you shall see clearly and al 
once how this is so. For consider some great mind, as 
it floats down from age to age in ever increasing grand- 
€ur, bearing with it a body of collected thought and truth, 
which leaves a leaven and a life-giving nourishment, in 
all the intellectual region through which it goes. Look 
carefully at it and long, not suffering your eye to be car- 
ried onward with the sweep of the great flood, so that 
you cannot pause along its shores, and you will see how 
many other minds have added their part, and unknown, 
unnamed have helped to swell the stream, which bears 
the name of that master spirit who sent it forth, and 
seems evermore to ride upon its waves. Nay, there are 
many streams of truth that have gone forth from un- 
known fountains, from minds that have seemingly dwelt 
apart from all intercourse of men, and all communion 
with their age. 

If I might venture on another illustration, I would 
find it in those old Cathedrals which bear the name of 
some one ruling mind which has finally given them 
unity and completeness ; while yet many minds have 
been exercised, and many hands have wrought, and one 
lias added a shaft, and another a capital, and others 
various carvings, all needful to the completeness of the 
whole stupendous plan. So that did we or could we 
see the reality of things, not one name only would be 
inscribed upon the mighty pile, but countless names 
written on every part, would bear witness to the mass 
of intellect and thought which had developed itself in 
that vast, glorious whole. Consider in like manner 
some one great work of learning, let it be in what de- 



18 

partment you may choose, which bears, and bears right- 
ly, his name who has given it form and, in one sense, 
being. Remember how many thoughts and truths have 
gone to its composition : not merely how many authori- 
ties have been directly consulted, but how much derived 
from intercourse with others, how many floating things 
embodied whose origin is not known ; and you will see, 
that though the work is truly his whose name it bears, 
still upon all its pages might be written other names, 
some known and some unknown, who have directly or 
indirectly, taught, or suggested, or contributed, in some 
way or another. And when you carry on your view, 
remembering all this, from one work, to the great body 
of Christian learning, into which in the way just now 
briefly sketched, the world's mind has issued, how count- 
less shall seem the numbers who have brought their parts. 
As in long and shadowy procession they return before 
our fancy's eye, one bringing the solid squared founda- 
tion stone, another the strong pillar, another the graceful 
ornament, each his own portion diverse from the other, 
we see amongst them not merely those whose forms we 
recognise and whose names we speak, but many who 
come humbly and in silence, content to bring their ofler- 
ing, and asking no higher honor than to be unknown 
workmen ; and then we learn who and what they are 
who have reared the vast temple of the learning and the 
literature of Christendom. Then we learn his true 
position who is, even in the smallest, humblest, most 
obscure way, a sharer in perpetuating, carrying on, and 
working out, this triumph of the Faith. For that if he 
be only in the lowest form, if he have the fewest minds 



19 

to work upon, the fewest truths and thoughts to give to 
others, still he is adding something to the mass of living 
thought, which will outlive him, and tell upon the minds 
of men forever. As an unseen bell struck in the air sends 
infinite vibrations round ; as an unseen blow upon the 
water sends widening circles over all the surface, so his 
words, if he speaks, shall move the intellectual atmos- 
phere ; so the impression he makes in any way shall send 
a sweeping v/idening motion through the world of mind. 
Wherefore from all these things we conclude, that the 
lowliest Christian Scholar has a lofty station ; that he 
should not under-estimate his position, even while he 
takes, as if he be truly wise he will take, the most modest 
estimation of himself ; and that that position is second 
only to the standing of the Hero- Saint. 

But on a high position, two things ever wait : great 
dangers, and lofty duties. Let me now, then, turn in 
accordance wdth the plan proposed in the beginning, to 
speak of these two things. 

The Scholar's dangers, like those of any other class 
of men, range themselves in two distinct groups. Those 
that are necessary and universal : and those which are 
peculiar to a generation or an age, and so pass away with 
such an age or generation, to be succeeded by others, 
more or less formidable as it may chance. For without 
dangers may the Scholar never be, else could he never 
be proved and tried. 

Now perhaps of all dangers, the most imminent here 
as well as elscvvhere, is the danger of self-deception. 
Indeed, it may be fairly questioned whether this be not 
the essential element in all ; whether as error of some 



20 

kind or another is the developed danger, so it may not 
be that self-deception lies at the very foundation of the 
whole matter. Be this however, as it may, and it cer- 
tainly is a point which may well deserve the most atten- 
tive consideration on the part of individuals, still I repeat 
it, self-deception is an imminent danger attendant on the 
position of the Christian Scholar. Self-deception, not 
as to his own character, not as to his own spiritual pro- 
gress, for that belongs to another and a higher phase of 
his being ; but as to his proper duty, his intellectual 
attainments, and in a word all his relations as a Scholar. 

Let us look at one or two of the points of which what 
has been said holds good. Points which may be sugges- 
tive of others, — for suggestion is all that one can hope to 
accomplish in a matter, to treat of which fully, might 
occupy volumes. Points, too, which may illustrate 
what has just been advanced, and show that to speak 
of the dangers of the Scholar, is not to exhibit a morbid 
timorousness, but to take a right and honest view of 
actual things. 

Let us take, then, the ever present, ever pressing dan- 
ger — which runs itself out into so many forms, and in 
such various ways — that the Scholar will utterly mistake 
his situation, his duties, his proper work. That he will 
look upon himself as an isolated person, with few or no 
relations to, and connexions with other men ; that he 
will consider his duties all to lie within the round of his 
own study, whence no voice need issue, no written 
words be sent declaring the truth, which he may indeed 
have found, but which he selfishly appropriates ; that he 
will regard his work as all comprised in acquiring for 



21 

himself, in storing his own mind, and plajing certainly 
in a rather more dignified way, the part of the grasping 
miser. Now there are infinite varieties of this character, 
each with its own nice shades and distinctive marks, 
from the really hard-working man who toils and moils 
on through life, touching no other mind because he with- 
draws from all, and makes himself, utterly isolated and 
alone ; down to the literary lounger, whose selfishness 
and self-deception, run out in another and yet a very 
similar channel. Yet infinitely various as these charac- 
ters are, none of them are, none of them can be, respect- 
able. The best we can but pity, the worst we must 
despise. And still a man may begin his way as a true 
Scholar, a Christian Scholar, and by yielding to this 
self-deception, degenerate from one of these states of 
character to another, until he who in the outset stood on 
such glorious vantage ground, and moved amid such 
companionships, may end his days, the literary trifler, 
the wretched, despicable dilettante : no longer sitting in 
honor and worth at the counsels of his Sovereign, but 
become a miserable eunuch of the Palace. 

Or even if things shall not reach this pass, still self- 
deception as to w^hat his real w^ork should be, may ren- 
der his labors next to useless, and make him feel, at 
last, that his life has been as good as thrown away. 
For the Scholar must work for the age in which he lives, 
if he will work to any purpose. I do not say that he 
must work with his age ; that depends upon whether his 
age is working rightly or no, but that he must work^br it. 
That is, that the bent of his pursuits, the course of his 
labors, the turn of his studies, must be determined by 



22 

the intellectual and moral wants of the time and the peo- 
ple in and amongst which his lot is cast. That his own 
mere tastes, or fancies, are not alone to be consulted ; 
that indeed to many fair and delightful walks of learning 
it may become his bounden duty resolutely to close his 
eyes, and from them to turn his steps ; not certainly as 
undervaluing any : not as if he" did not allow to each its 
proper place and dignity, as forming a part of what is 
all divine ; but as knowing that here as well as else- 
where, there are opportunities for self-denial and self- 
sacrifice. As knowing that in learning as well as life, 
the finger of God directs, the voice of conscience orders, 
and that both must be obeyed. To recur to an illustra- 
tion which has been used before ; as it is with the pro- 
gress of some vast architectural erection, so is it in this 
matter. It is vain, it is worse than vain, when it is 
time to lay the foundation deep and strong, to be en- 
deavouring to pile the graceful pinnacle or rear the 
slender shaft, or swing the vaulted roof. It is vain, it is 
worse than vain, when it is time to strengthen with the 
firm buttress weak and trembling walls, to attempt to 
carry round those walls, unstrengthened and unsustained, 
the light and carved parapet, or to rear upon them the 
lofty spire. There is a time for all these various works ; 
but to attempt to do them out of time is loss of labor, 
and a hinderance to the progress of the plan. So in all 
learning. Each age has its work, clearly laid upon it, 
distinctly pointed out : and the danger is not small, nay, 
rather it is great, that the Scholar will choose his own 
work rather than that which is laid before him, and 
therefore fail and fall : saying at last, when self-decep- 
tion ends, not I have lost a day, but I have lost my life. 



23 

These two forms of self-deception on which we have 
now been dwelling, have not been selected as being by 
any means the most obvious ; though certainly they may 
well be considered as among the most dangerous. 
Rather it seemed desirable that when suggestion was all 
which could possibly be accomplished, more recondite 
and subtle forms should be selected : as thereby we 
might perhaps be brought to feel how wide reaching, 
and of what far extent the danger was. That it runs 
itself out, not only in what one so often sees, and can- 
not but see to mourn, in the substitution of temporary 
and selfish ends, personal triumphs, or the achievement 
of a brilliant reputation, instead of the advancement of 
eternal and unchanging truth ; in the propagation of 
error ; in irreverent assumption or unscholarlike arro- 
gance ; that not in these high obvious forms of ill alone 
it finds its issue ; but in others, also, deeper and more 
hidden, and therefore it may be, all the more dangerous. 
Let these suggestions and these instances, serve then, to 
illustrate that one, great, overwhelming danger, to which 
at all times and in every age the Scholar is exposed ; 
and against which every man who would not fail of run- 
ning lawfully, and therefore lose his crown, is bound 
most earnestly, most heedfully to guard himself And let 
us now pass to a few thoughts upon other dangers, which 
as I have said are not universal, but belong to peculiar 
eras, being themselves peculiar and diverse. 

*A popular writer has said, that while in any situation 
whatever, high or low, marked or obscure, it is a compar- 
atively easy thing to be a man o/" one's age, to be a man 
for one's age, is quite another, and a much more difficult 



24 

matter. It is always easy to swim with the current ; to 
go whither what is called the spirit of the age will carry 
one. And surely if that spirit is a right and true one, 
and flowing onward toward such a point as one should 
wish to reach, it is wise and well to go with it. But 
how often is this not the case ; nay, how often is the 
precise contrary the fact. And therefore w^hile it is a 
morbid and unhealthy feehng which concludes that the 
animating spirit of any age is always of necessity wrong 
and evil ; it is quite as morbid and quite as unhealthy a 
one, only in another way, which, — misinterpreting the 
sentence, divine when traly understood, that speaks of 
the people's voice, meaning the real utterances of human- 
ity, as being instinct with divinity, — concludes that the 
course of the age is always right. That the Scholar 
may not sometimes be called by every duty, and every 
responsibily to set himself in opposition to it, to denounce 
it, to make it anathema, to struggle manfully against its 
current, even to his own overwhelming and destruction. 

It follows then, that the tendencies of any age may 
be evil ; it is fair and wise to believe that there wdll al- 
ways be evil ones among them : for surely he must be a 
most unshaken optimist who can think otherwise ; these 
evil tendencies bring dangers as to other men, so es- 
pecially to the Scholar ; and these dangers are those 
which I have called the dangers of an era, in contradis- 
tinction from those which attach to every possible epoch 
of the history of man. 

As a further illustration of these positions, let us con- 
sider a twofold danger, — for dangers are mostly twofold 
in their character, — which attaches to our age ; and 



25 

which presents a problem that the Scholar must solve, 
thoughtfully and carefully unless he be willing to go on 
at random, in which case he does not deserve his apella- 
tion. The danger is, that he will on the one hand give 
nothing, or on the other everything to the past : and the 
problem to be decided is, of course, precisely how much 
should be given to it. The danger on the one hand is 
certainly very clear and obvious. Self distrust, distrust 
of the present, reverent turning to catch the voices of 
other days as they float solemnly down the course of 
ages, these are obviously not so characteristical of our 
age and country as to warrant any great anxiety that 
the claims of the present on our regard will be lightly 
cast aside. A superficial • and encyclopedic, and review- 
ing age, is always self confident. And a self confident 
age, is of course in its relations to the past always 
in danger of going to the extreme of forgetfulness : 
which forgetfulness it finds it easy to account for, by 
various theories of progress, or development, or what^ 
ever men may choose to call them. Indeed it has gen- 
erally seemed enough, — so pressing has this danger been 
considered, so imminent in truth has it really been,— 
it has generally been considered quite sufficient to con- 
demn it in general terms. Nor has it seemed, a matter of 
importance how general those terms were, provided 
only that they were sufficiently strong and startling. 

But is there not a danger too on the other hand ? I 
do not mean a danger that we shall reverence and es- 
teem the past too much, for if the past be rightly es- 
timated that can scarcely be ; but that we shall fall into 
an unreal, untrue, dreamy way of looking at the past 



26 

itself, and therefore incur the evil when we least expect 
it. There certainly is such a thing as the mere blind 
worship of the formal past : there is such a thing as 
attempting to force over the body of some living, un- 
changing, eternal principle of truth, some antiquated 
guise which it does not need to wear, to throw around 
it old externals, which are not of the essence of its 
being. And this is playing at scholarship and learning ; 
this is unreal, hollow and untrue, a mimic pageantry, a 
soulless masquerade. I trust that I may not be misun- 
derstood. I do not speak of divine institutions but of 
human ones, or of human applications of those that 
are divine. I am not advocating the doctrines of that 
wretched pantheistic view of human history, which 
makes the highest and the holiest things that God has 
given men, but mere ideas, to be developed by the exer- 
cise of human intellect, into something or into nothing ; 
which makes succeeding ages to create new principles 
which former ages had not ; and declares that change in 
essence and not change in form, of truth, is the law 
which regulates the course of time. All this is one 
thing. But to say that principles are few and truth is 
one ; and that the Scholar must beware lest in avoiding 
the extren\e of not finding these principles and that 
truth, living and working in most instructive wise in all 
at least of the Christian past, he shall fall into another 
quite as evil, of mistaking their external garb, their out- 
ward expressions for the things themselves, what has this 
to do with that hardy spirit which changes at will the in- 
stitutions of our God ? With that pantheistic philosophy 
which confounds substance and accident, essence and 



27 

form, spirit and matter, God and man ? What is this 
more than to say, that we must not mistake the body of 
the boy, or of the grown up man, or of the saint per- 
fected, for that undying soul, which gives to each its all 
of life and glory ? 

And how great too is the danger lest the Scholar 
may fall into an even more unreal and dreamy way of 
looking at the past. For the temper of the Scholar 
which he must cultivate and cherish, is the Historical 
Temper, and this may be perverted to a most evil 
purpose. The present, rough, harsh, angular, with all 
that is disagreeable standing out from it most prominent- 
ly, is all about us. It grates upon us, its corners wound 
and lacerate, it is homely and wears a stern and every 
day aspect, it forbids and it discourages. Not small 
then is the temptation to turn away from it, and en- 
deavour, as it is said, — though what is meant by it is very 
difficult to see, — endeavour to live in the past. To in- 
dulge fond regrets for glories faded and for majesties 
gone by, and instead of looking resolutely at what lies 
about and before one, to cast back longing looks upon the 
distant landscape, sun-gilt or clothed in rosy flush of 
light, soft, slumberous, silent and obscure. To shut 
one's ears to the harsh tones of men around one, and to 
seek to live with those alone, with whom indeed the 
Scholar must live much^ but may not live entirely, whose 
voices murmur gently from the sepulchre, or seem to 
swell in solemn strains of melody from the far distant 
skies. But this is wretched : this is unworthy of a 
man, and most unworthy of a Scholar. For sure we 
may be, " that the man over whom present wants, pres- 






28 

ent duties, and present facts have no vigorous influence, 
is the very worst qualified man for apprehending by-gone 
wants, by-gone duties, by-gone facts. '^ He wants 
truth fuhiess, and that is the very foundation of the 
Scholar's character. And beside, what man in his 
senses, can ever be sighing in this way after past periods, 
be they never so glorious, never so fully inscribed with 
names that bare the brow and make the pulses swell ? 
Let us know what it is we do if we do this. " If we 
ask that the age in which St. Paul preached may come 
again, we ask also that Nero may come back. If we ask 
that we may be transported back to the glorious period 
of Athanasius, we ask to live under the tyrant Constan- 
tius ; to have the world almost wholly Pagan, the 
Church almost wholly Arian. If we long to sit at the 
feet of Chrysostom, we long for the infamous corrup- 
tions of Antioch and of Constantinople. If we reckon 
that it would have been a blessing to live and die under 
the teaching of Augustine, we must be content to see 
Rome sacked by one set of Barbarians, and the Church 
in Africa threatened by another : we must get our learn- 
ing from a race of effete rhetoricians, and dwell amid all 
the seductions and abominations of Manicheism." And 
if it were thus vain and evil to have the ages themselves 
return in reality and life, how much more vain, because 
unreal and unmeaning, for a man to endeavour to throw 
himself into them in any other way than as a seeker after 
truth, and try to live there. Who can do it, or even wish to 
doit, who believes that life is what it is, an earnest, awful 
struggle with and for realities, and not a fleeting dream ? 
No doubt the sculptor would have consulted his ease 



29 

and pleasure ; no doubt his visions of beauty would have 
been as high, had he dreamed over them inactively, and 
never applied his hand to fashion the rude, rough, shape- 
less mass of stone. But where then would have been 
the form which leads and teaches other minds, and im- 
bues countless spirits in the course of ages with the love 
and the sense of the beautiful or the sublime. Oh no ! 
life is no dream, learning is no dream, the past is no 
dream but as we shall make them so. And woe to the 
man who tries to make them so. Woe to the Scholar 
who dreams when he should work : who vainly tries to 
re-create the past, when he should help to inform and 
mould the present, on and by all which that past has 
gathered in a long and glorious array, of truth and hero- 
ism, of grace and strength, of grandeur and of beauty. 

But time forbids me to dwell longer on a field of 
thought which spreads and widens as we advance into 
it, and I leave it to speak briefly of the Scholar's duty. 

And what is to be said here, has been of necessity 
somewhat anticipated in that which has already been 
advanced. Because to speak of dangers, is impliedly 
at least to speak of duties also. I may perhaps sum up 
the Scholar's duty in two words : that he must be a prac- 
tical man , But in using these words, care must be taken 
lest they shall be misunderstood. In speaking of the 
Scholar as a practical man, I do not by any means annex 
such a signification to the words, as is annexed to them 
by the men of a narrow minded and money getting age, 
or generation, whose highest aspirations are to sum their 
temporal estates in a line of six figures, and whose best 
literature are day books and legers. All this is well in its 



30 

place; nay more, it is not to be treated with contempt; but 
when we are speaking of Scholarship and Scholars, it 
is not to be suffered to come into the account. There, 
the practical man is not the man who can drive the 
shrewdest bargain ; or who is most skilled in getting 
through the world with the greatest possible advantage 
to himself, and the least possible to every body else ; or 
who can shew himself most at home in the ordinary 
w^alks and intercourses of every day life. Not such a 
man as this is the practical Scholar. But he is the man, 
who when he comes in contact with another mind, has 
powder to give that mind a bent, an impulse, a lofty tone, 
a high direction, an earnest ardor, and to impart to it 
something in the way of knowledge, as well as to wake 
it to a deeper, fuller, truer life. But who shall be, who 
shall make himself such a man ? He who realises to 
the full that glorious position of the Christian Scholar, 
he who avoids the dangers attendant on that position, 
to which your attention has been called. He and none 
other shall gain every point. Will he slight learning, 
will he turn away from the treasures of the past, and 
suffer himself to fall into the wretched, unmeaning talk 
one often hears about book- worms and book-learning ? 
Will he neglect his own mind, and take no care to fill it 
with all knowledge which he can, ever directing his 
pursuit of knowledge by the wants of the age and peo- 
ple in and amongst which he lives ? Such a man is not 
a practical Scholar. Do men call an artificer practical 
if he does not know his trade ; and would it not be 
prima facie evidence against him, were his shop found 
utterly unfurnished, and presenting to him who came to 



31 

see, a floor with nothing on it, girt about with four bare 
walls ? So with the Scholar's mind. If it be not stored, 
and well stored, he will be a man trying to work without 
instruments and means : his natural capacities may be 
what you please, &nd the greater they are, the more 
conspicuous will be his failure. To store well, then, is 
the first part, the very foundation of that Scholar's duty 
who would be a really and truly practical man. And in 
storing let him not forget the rule so applicable to his 
work, 

Omne tulit pimctum, qui miscuit utile dulcL ''For," 
says Bishop Hurd, "the unnatural separation of the dulce 
and the utile^ has done almost as much hurt in letters^ as 
that of the honestum and utile, which Tully somewhere 
complains of, in morals. For while the polite writer, 
as he is called, contents himself with the former of these 
qualities, and the man of erudition with the latter, it 
comes to pass as the same author expresses it, that the 
learned are deficient in popular eloquence, and the elo- 
quent fail in finished scholarship."^ 

But again ; for thus far we have but viewed the half of 
the Scholar's duty. The other half is to use what has 
been gained, by bringing it so to bear on other minds, as 
that some mark, how humble soever, shall still be left on 
them ; some impulse given ; something in a word im- 
parted. To recur to our illustration, homely indeed 
but still significant, as without knowledge and instru- 
ments the artificer cannot work, so knowledge and in- 
struments are all in vain to one who folds his hands and 
will not. This state is I suppose what they have in 

^Hurd's Horace. Note on the Ars Poetica. 



32 

view, who talk of learned leisure and literary ease* 
That state of "judicial, magisterial, collegiate, parochi- 
al or private efflorescence," in which the vegetative pro- 
cess advances with a solemn dignity of progress, a grace- 
ful ease of growth; and the glorious termination of 
whose course, is, that its decay may possibly enrich the 
soil on which it has brooded like an incubus, giving 
neither shade nor ornament, flower nor fruit. But one 
would hope that the growth of a mushroom was not the 
type of the progress of a Scholar. 

In truth, as we see, the Scholar's duty is two-fold ; 
and let us say with reverence and awe, that it finds its 
perfect pattern, where the pattern of all life, and all its 
parts is found, in that most awful life which the world 
has ever seen, which itself real, presents also the true 
ideal, — the life of Him, who being very God, was also 
very man. Alone with the Father, and then mingling 
with men ; such was that awful, most mysterious life, 
in which the pantheists of our day see so little, that they 
can put its spirit on a level with the art of Greece, and 
with the law of Rome ;^ but in which the true souls of 
other days, and the noblest of our own, see the true 
model of the truest life of every living man, be he who, 
or what, or where he may. Alone and then with men ; 
such was the life of Christ ; such must be the Christian's 
life ; such too must be the life of the Christian Scholar. 
Alone in those still hours of thought and study, in which, 
even as Virgil guided Dante only under the direction of 
Beatrice, so human learning leads him on only under the 

^So Michelet in his blasphemous book called " The People." The 
sentiment has been echoed on this side of the Atlaqtic. 



33 

guidance of his holy Faith : in which, with all low, pal- 
try notions of aggrandisement or of gaining reputation 
cast away, with all veils of self-deception torn aside, his 
one only object has been to gain a deeper hold on deep, 
eternal truth ; in which the great ends of life have been 
in solemn vision clear before his eyes, and he has remem- 
bered that that man cannot study well, who does not 
devoutly pray and discipline himself, since the being 
most like Satan which the world can show, is the man 
of trained intellect and of untrained heart ; alone in hours, 
over-brooded by these things and thoughts, he has labour- 
ed to acquire knowledge, principles, truths, needful for 
himself, needful for other men. The world has seen in 
him the shrinking trembler, the dreamer of some dream, 
the unreal man, knowing little or nothing of his kind. 
But he knows that no man who has not silently studied 
himself, can know other men : that the best and truest 
knowledge of humanity they have gained who have best 
known themselves : and that the cloistered saint has a 
deeper insight into human nature, than the world's busy 
man. He knows his ends and purposes, and he bides 
his time, patiently, meekly, but firmly and with unshaken 
heart. 

That time will come. It may be long in coming, but 
he can afford to wait ; for they are men of little plans 
and paltry ends, who hurry and bustle about the world. 
And when it does come, when the voice of God is heard 
to call, and conscience clearly points, then he goes forth, 
in a greater or a smaller sphere of action, yet great or 
small still glorious, and then he is with men, and from 
that time forth his twofold life alternates with itself. 



34 

Working for the age, he strives to correct its errors 
mainly b J endeavoring to infuse positive truth ; to advance 
all in it that is good and true ; to fight nianfully against 
that form, be it what it may, under which Satan attacks 
the truth of God, and in a word to stand in the position, 
to keep himself from the dangers, and to discharge the 
duties of a Christian Scholar. 

Especially, as I have said, will he labor to discover, 
for he is quite sure that it exists, the mode which in his 
day, the attack of the adversary will assume, against 
that Faith whose defence is the highest form of his 
vocation. The mode varies. Now it is direct assault ; 
now it is insinuation ; and again it is imitation. This 
last is the mode of our day : it is evident in all the litera- 
ture of whatsoever kind, which certain sections of the 
intellectual world are sending forth ; and to correct, or 
at least to expose and denounce which, is therefore the 
bounden duty of the Christian Scholar.^ 

And surely on such duties w^ell discharged, high honor 
waits. Surely the place and work of him who faith- 
fully performs them, who manfully goes through them, 
is but inferior to theirs who minister the word and sacra- 
ments of Christ ; nay it waits on and seconds their high 
service ; and in its self-humiliation is exalted beyond all 
other human things. Surely the work of binding men 
in intellectual brotherhood, in the participation of truth, 
is next to that which binds in the sweet unities of Chris- 
tian Charity their higher souls. For so it is, that the 

^It was obviously impossible to enter fully into this peculiar phase of the 
infidelity of our day, which, as a late writer has said, "derived from the 
Jew Spinoza, bids fair to divide the realms of thought with the Christian 
Faith." 1 would refer to an article on Pantheistic Tendencies, in the, 
April No. of the Christian Remembrancer, 184^. 



35 

Cherub's holy knowledge, yields primacy and precedence 
to nothing, but the Seraph's ardent love. 

Gentlemen : 

I have thus spoken, how imperfectly no one can be 
half so sensible as I am, on that high and holy theme, 
so naturally suggested by the circumstances under which 
we have assembled. For indeed it is a theme that over- 
tasks one's powers, making him feel that where so much 
is of necessity left unsaid, he has said next to nothing : 
where an angel's voice might be honored in its utterance, 
he can have said but slenderly and meanly what he has. 
Yet happily, the very circumstances which suggest, do 
also themselves address us with a force and power which 
no words can reach ; an eloquence which, voiceless 
though it may be, yet thrills directly to the heart. 

These old familiar scenes, recalling other days, whose 
depth of meaning, whose exceeding value, whose bearing 
on our future life, we could not know, and scarcely could 
imagine ; these stirrings of the heart as hands are grasped 
at this brief meeting of long severed friends, or words 
exchanged which tell of others gone ; the names of 
those departed worthies, which in yonder halls are now 
as household words to us; that honored name^ joined 
with theirs in a union which shall outlast the stones that 
there are piled, the name of him our Founder, around 
whose venerable presence cluster for so many of us the 
deepest, holiest memories of all our lives, the memories 
of vows uttered on earth and registered in heaven ; — 

iThe College buildings bear the names of ibe three Bishops of Connec- 
ticut: Seabury, Jarvis, and Browuell. 



36 

God grant that for many a long year as hither we come 
up, that presence may make glad our eyes and hearts ; — 
and more perhaps than all, that sacred Name which has 
f( r many a long century summed up the Christian faith, 
and now has given a new and glorious consecration to our 
mother's homes ; all these I say, address us here. All 
these, repeat the solemn exhortation which was given us 
when we were severally from this place sent forth to 
enter on the work of life. We cannot choose but listen 
to them. We cannot choose but feel them. But let us do 
more. Let us obey them. Let us resolve, that be we 
what else we may, we will each in our place and as God 
gives us power, we will be Christian Scholars. And 
that in all our way, whether of silent study and solitary 
thought, or in our minglings with men where study bears 
its fruit, and thought performs its work on other minds, 
our constant changeless rule, shall be the noble motto of 
our College, 

FOR THE CHURCH AND FOR OUR COUNTRY.^ 
iPro Ecclesia et Patria. The Legend on the College Seal. 



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